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He is an imaginative ani- mal, an animal with notions. In this view, "Near a Thousand Tables" blazes no trail; most food writing these days seems to be about food as symbol. But Fernández-Armesto adds some excel- lent material, especially on the modern connections betvveen food and faith. For example, a number of Qyaker tàmilies, notably the English Cadburys, went into the production of cocoa because they saw hot chocolate as a temperance drink. Christiani1Jr, however, was only one of the major Western religions of the nineteenth century. There was also manifest destin}T, and the need to toughen us up in order to achieve it. Sylvester Graham, a revivalist preacher and the father of the eponymous cracker, rec- ommended wheat and celibacy. J. H. Kellogg, raised as an Adventist, also stumped for grains. To him, of course, we owe cornflakes. Arrayed against these low-protein crusaders were the high-protein folk, notably James H. Sal- isbury, whose nutritional experiments on himse including long periods of eatIng only one food or another, left him with a distaste for vegetables. In his 1888 book, "The Relation of Alimenta- tion and Disease," he declared that veg- etables paralyzed the muscles of the stomach, making it "flabby and bagg)T." What human beings needed was beef and more bee preferably pulped. Salis- bury steak, an almost daily occurrence in the college cafeterias of yesteryear, was named after this theorist, but, according to Fernández-Armesto, what Salisbury actually invented was the hamburger. Meanwhile, sauces and condiments were the province of Henry J. Heinz, of Pittsburgh, who, intending to go into the Lutheran ministf)T, went into the food ministry instead. He devel- oped more varieties than the fifty-seven bannered in his company's motto, but he stuck to that number because it had been vouchsafed to him in a vi- sion he had while riding the New York City subway: Food evangelism has not gone away: Nor, according to Fernández-Armesto, have most of our forbears' other food habits. Takeout, for example, is at least tvvo thousand years old. The majority of ancient Romans got their dinners from street venders, as did European city dwellers of later centuries, and there was much to choose from. Zabar's has noth- ing on the street kitchens of thirteenth- century Paris, where "you could buy boiled and roast veal, beef, mutton, pork, lamb, kid, pigeon, capon, goose; spiced pasties filled with chopped pork, chicken or eel; tarts filled with soft cheese or egg, hot waffles and wafers, cakes, pancakes, simnels. . . hot mashed peas, garlic sauce, cheese of Cham- pagne and Brie." Trends that have van- ished will probably be back pretty soon. Once white bread was developed, brown bread was stricdy for poor people and immigrants. Then came the gastro- nomic revolution of the sixties, and now white bread is for poor people and im- migrants. Hence the unflappability of the food historians. Actuall}T, one or two things do raise Fernández-Armesto's hackles, such as salad bars, where "sad shreds of salad vegetables lie exposed to contamination." Indeed, he regards the whole modern craze for raw foods as a species of "romantic primitivism." Nor is he a friend of the microwave oven. By making it easier for family members to eat different meals at different times, mi- crowaves threaten to undo the coolang revolution, he says, and to return us "to a presocial phase of evolution." Still, he thinks we'll get over these dangerous ideas: "Reason and instinct are combining irresistibly to reverse them." People have rejected instant coffee, he assures us, and "the priorities of fast food already seem as outmoded as Futurism or Vorticism." We should all just relax, and go home and have dinner with our families: "The future will be much more like the past than the pundits of futurol- ogy have foretold." This sounds marvel- lous. I don't think it's true-and my gro- cery store is currendy offering thirteen varieties of instant coffee, if you count freeze-dried-but it's nice to be told that everything is going to be O.K. In our countf)T, conservatives are a grumpy lot, but in England they are often happy- indeed, bright and fun and naughtJ One envies them. +